facebook friends

It has now been 92 hours since I made it impossible for me to log on to Facebook. How did I do this? It was simple.

I opened Notepad. Then, I created a random password consisting of about thirty-five random characters in a row that I produced by closing my eyes and doing a big piano glissando up and down the computer keyboard. I copied it, put it in the “change password” field on Facebook, and promptly deleted it from Notepad. Then I logged off.

Since Facebook requires one to post their old password prior to creating a new one, and since I now have no idea what my old password is, I will simply never log on to Facebook again.

Why did I do this? Let’s look at the hard facts.

(1) I just punched in facebook.com on my browser to see how many notifications I had received in the past 92 hours. Interestingly, the number is 184. That’s twice 92 – and I kid you not. This means I was receiving one notification every half an hour.

Now, let’s say I would spend fifteen minutes addressing each notification. (That, by the way, is a very conservative estimate, knowing me.) 15 times 184 amounts to 2,760. 2,760 minutes amounts to 46 hours. In the 92 hour period of time, that means I would have spent half my time on Facebook, dealing with the notifications alone. Can I afford to spend half my time on Facebook? No, I cannot.

(2) I am a person who has been diagnosed with severe adult attention hyperactive deficit disorder, otherwise known as ADHD. What this means, as far as Facebook is concerned, is that whatever stimulus is the strongest and most immediate will be the one that grabs my attention.

One morning, for example, I logged onto Facebook in order to grab a video from my daughter’s video files to send to a friend of mine. Before I could find the video, a friend of mine who was feeling depressed logged on, and I spent two hours in an effort to console him. Point is, his depression struck me as being of more immediate importance than the elusive video my daughter had made, which was buried somewhere deep within her video files, and therefore less immediate. Once my friend was comforted, no sooner did I begin once again to look for the video, when another friend of mine showed up, wanting to discuss a subject about which I am passionate. Her passion striking me as being of more immediate importance than my daughter’s video, I quite passionately discussed the important subject with her for another two hours. Then I had to go to work. In the meantime, I forgot all about the video, which was the only reason I had logged onto Facebook in the first place. Thus are the effects of Adult ADHD.

(3) As one who is Sicilian by genetic predisposition, I have a very difficult time letting go of the past. It therefore stands to reason that if I want this situation to improve, I ought not to be hanging around too many people whom I knew in the past, and instead throw more of my focus on developing positive friendships in the present, that will lead me to a more positive future. Moreover, reconciling with certain figures from the distant past has more than once proved to be disastrous.

And here’s where the story gets good:

(4) At one point in my life, I made a casual comment on my Facebook that was misinterpreted by a well-meaning Facebook friend. All of a sudden, three cops came pounding on my door. They handcuffed me, ransacked my hotel room for narcotics and firearms, (of which I had neither!) and hauled me off to an insane asylum.

I was released the next morning, but highly inconvenienced by the ordeal. My blood pressure shot up sky high, and I had to sit on a gurney in an emergency room for about six and a half hours before it was low enough for me to be legally hauled away to the nearest local loony bin, twenty-five miles South of my hotel room.

There, I managed to convince the baffled psych techs that I was neither suicidal nor homicidal. I was released in my T-shirt in freezing cold December weather, and I wandered around for three days until the debit card refund for my hotel room cleared to my account. (Obviously, I lost the hotel room, where I had paid for a two week stay, because when the 9-1-1 team showed up to haul me off to the psychiatric pavilion, all of the tenants came out of their doors to see what all the ruckus was about; and due to the police involvement, the hotel manager did not want to rent to me any longer. I also left most of my clothing in the room, along with some books. The motel room owners claimed no responsibility for items life in the building.)

As for the Facebook friend who made the dubious 9-1-1 call? Long story short, I basically never heard from him again, except for a total of exactly two fairly unpleasant interactions in the following four years. Must not have been much of a friend. But he sure seemed like a friend for a while there, because he was the only one out of my some 300 odd Facebook friends who was concerned enough about my well-being to even consider making such a call. And this leads to my 5th reason:

(5) These hundreds of people on your Facebook “friends” list are by and large not your friends. You think they are your friends, because you befriended them when you were both in your teens or early twenties, and it was wonderful to reconnect with them. Perhaps they are friends of friends of yours, or maybe even friends of people who are not your friends. You know how to find out who your friends are on Facebook? It’s easy, which leads to my sixth reason:

(6) I gave my phone number and email address to all of my Facebook friends some time prior to my abrupt departure. Outside of the handful of people whom I already knew to be my true friends, you know how many of them actually called me? Exactly three. Thank you, Paul, Mari, and Holly. Now I know who my friends are. :)

(7) When I found myself arguing politics pointlessly with a total stranger in New York City who would not only never change his mind, but was probably drunk off his butt and had no idea what I was even talking about, enough was enough.

What all of this points to is:

(8) I have had five Facebooks in the past ten years. Every one of them started out fine, then in some way imploded. Every time I started a new one, I mistakenly thought I had overcome my dysfunctional obsessive-compulsive addictive relationship with Facebook. I was wrong.